Order management systems are computer software and/or hardware systems implemented by a number of industries to facilitate order entry and processing. Companies, such as catalog companies and those utilizing electronic commerce, use order management systems to receive, process and fulfill customer orders. An order management system makes possible the entering of an order via a web-site shopping cart or data entry system. The system typically captures customer proprietary information and/or account level information for each order. Credit verification or payment processing may then be performed to check for available funds and validate the transaction. Valid orders are processed for warehouse fulfillment, including picking, packing and shipping of the ordered goods or services.
An order management system typically manages or orchestrates business processes. Business processes are typically modeled by business architects/analysts. A business process may model message exchanges with different systems in a web services environment. The business architects/analysts then provide an information technology (“IT”) designer with the business model, typically in the form of a flowchart. The IT designer uses an orchestration language, such as business process execution language (“BPEL”), to code the business process. Because the IT designer and business architects/analysts have different skill sets (e.g., the business architects/analysts are familiar with the business process being modeled and the IT designer is familiar with the orchestration language but not the business process), the resulting BPEL process developed by the IT designer may not work as the business architects/analysts imagined. Accordingly, there may be a wide divide between the originally conceived business process model and the implemented model. In addition, because multiple personnel/resources are involved, the costs to model and code business processes are significant.